Niccolo Machiavelli Quotes

We all get swept up in the hype machine. Nobody is immune to that.

Public opinion is no more than this. What people think that other people think.

Men are valued, not for what they are, but for what they seem to be.

The crowd has a way of being right.

The mass, whether it be a crowd or an army, is vile.

I've been amazed at how fast and herd-like opinions in the United States are.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

Image is powerful, but image is also superficial.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

A crowd always thinks with its sympathy, never with its reason.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

We're in a kind of vicious cycle where the media tell the politicians, and the politicians tell the people, that perception is reality, and the perception of saving dooms a politician. I don't believe perception is reality, or that all Americans think that.

Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be.

It is an accepted commonplace in psychology that the spiritual level of people acting as a crowd is far lower than the mean of each individual's intelligence or morality.

Leaders are made in the image of the masses.

The great enemy of reason, virtue and religion, the Multitude, that numerous piece of monstrosity.

It is a good part of sagacity to have known the foolish desires of the crowd and their unreasonable notions.

… the irresistible power of concentrated public opinion

… a crowd is more than the sum of the individuals who compose it. The collective body thinks and acts in ways which the component units thinking and acting for themselves would never sanction and would often reprobate. In general the action of the crowd is more emotional and less intellectual than the action of an individual. The nerve counts for more, the brain for less. Waves of sentiment or cruelty pass through the collective body with a force which the individuals who compose it find it difficult to comprehend, when they are removed from the contagion of their neighbours…

A crowd, proportionately to its size, magnifies all that in its units pertains to the emotions, and diminishes all that in them pertains to thought.

The human race is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it.

In all professions each affects a look and an exterior to appear what he wishes the world to believe that he is. Thus we may say that the whole world is made up of appearances.

Citizens have long been easily influenced by the opinions of others and sought social proof, but social media have amplified the phenomena to unprecedented heights. As digital devices permeate every aspect of our lives, it has boosted the way in which information can distort truth.

The sum of the crowd's IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.

Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It's called being mass man.